Study Overview
Soft-skills training is increasingly used to improve youth employment and entrepreneurship, yet little is known about how instructor heterogeneity shapes program effects. Most evaluations compare curricula or program models while treating instruction as a black box. We study whether teachers generate meaningful variation in skill acquisition and long-run economic outcomes, and which teacher attributes predict effectiveness. We exploit the experimental design of the Skills for Effective Entrepreneurship Education (SEED) program in Uganda. Recent secondary-school graduates were randomly assigned to hard-skills training, soft-skills training, or control; participating students were randomized across classes; and teachers were assigned to curricula and locations through structured randomization procedures. Because teachers rotated across classes, we estimate curriculum-specific value-added models in which student outcomes are regressed on teacher exposure shares, baseline covariates, and randomization-stratum fixed effects. Teacher effects are normalized to sum to zero within curriculum, and inference is based on randomization procedures that preserve the original assignment blocks. We first estimate the dispersion of teacher effects on technical and socioemotional learning. We then relate estimated value added to teacher curriculum knowledge, cognitive ability, personality, socioemotional skills, prior experience, and socioeconomic background, accounting for estimation error in the first-stage effects. Finally, we test whether exposure-weighted teacher value added predicts students’ long-run employment, entrepreneurship, and income. The study extends the teacher-value-added literature beyond formal schooling and provides evidence on whether experimentally identified instructor effects persist across outcome domains and over time.
IBSI Initiative or Center: Lab for Inclusive FinTech (LIFT)